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What the machine is doing to mankind
WHAT THE MACHINE
IS DOING
TO MANKIND.*
BY JAMES Economist
SHELBY
for Commonwealth
THOMAS,
and Southern
LL.D.,
Corporation
of New York.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: I am not unmindful of the great honor you confer upon me by this invitation to address this very distinguished society, The Franklin Institute. We live in an atmosphere today particularly conducive to critics. We seem to have plenty of the stuff of which they are born. Verily, our achievements of liberty are great. We think as we please. The mass-man has been released and is going places. He and his self-appointed spokesmen are attacking everything, the machine and industrialism included. Well, this attacking business is a pleasant and exhilarating exercise. For while we attack, we have no need of doubt and less for constructive planning. We only need to affirm vehemently that whatever is, is wrong. The spell of indignation is upon us. We unconsciously become the high priests of evangelism and change. Change of what sort? It is no matter. Any sort, just so it is change. “Tear down and you will build something better” is the favorite axiom of critical philosophers, though by now Greece and Rome have good reason for doubting its truth. It is to be observed, however, that the philosopher always leaves the work of reconstruction to more practical people. In the wake of this criticism generally, the machine and industrialism have been caught up in a perfect barrage of disparaging pronouncements, and for the moment both seem to be faring badly. The criticism may be more marked in my section of the country, The Deep South, because our cultural pattern has been determined largely by an almost exclusive agricultural technique only yesterday emerged from the * Presented at the Stated Meeting held Wednesday, 247
November
16, 1932.
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JAMES
SHELBY
THOMAS.
[J.F. I.
slavery type so persistent in exclusively agricultural countries. This explains more of the tenant system, incidentally, than some of us are willing to admit. For twenty years I have been an ardent advocate of the larger industrialization of the South. In this work it has become necessary from time to time to point out to an unbalanced population, 75 per cent. of which is rural, the It is for this benefits to be derived from industrialization. reason that I am now defending the machine and industrialism, the beneficial effects of which are being seriously questioned by many in my section of the country. It is world Nor is this criticism peculiar to the South. wide. The intelligentsia of the most industrialized countries of the world are merciless in their criticisms of the machine. Fundamentally, here is the reason for much of the criticism of ‘science and the machine. We invent our machines, we use them, they work, we accept them. We inherit our institutions and metaphors and, therefore, must save them. Physically, we are neighbors. Psychologically,. we are far apart. Our philosophical ideals are slow to change. The machine is not only indifferent to accepted philosophies, but impatient with them. It always wants to be getting on. The philosophy of restless change so characteristic of Western Civilization was begot by science and nurtured into huskiness by the machine. The chief characteristic of Western Civilization has been its belief in science and the machine. It dares look facts in the face, and then do something about it. On the other hand, the Oriental has attempted to solve his problems by metaphysical speculation with no recognition of the material forces which play about him and in his futile attempt to explain the universe thus, he has been driven to the philosophy of defeatism. There are evidences today that we of the West are getting tired and nothing is so tragic as a tired, discouraged, decaying culture. The use of the machine has created many problems for us. But hitherto, we have liked problems. Industry, which so widely uses science and the machine, must not neglect its social responsibility. Industry has created many of our religious, moral, political, and social problems. The machine
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has changed our occupations, hours of labor, delights, recreations, social and religious ideals. Philosophers are being forced to take cognizance of these changes, and they are in none too good humor about it. Indeed, they are just now giving the machine fits. Things go on about our very heads without our knowing it. People and races are rarely conscious of the beginnings of their culture and more rarely conscious of its development. There are two types of culture among all people-an idealistic culture about which everybody raves, and a materialistic culture about which nobody raves. Yet we all work at these two cultures, philosopher, sage, industrialist and laborer alike. The idealistic culture finds expression in religion, philosophy, and the fine arts. The materialistic culture is embodied in science, invention, machines, industry and commerce. Both types of culture blend to make the general cultural pattern a people enjoy and we all work together to produce that pattern. The materialistic culture has always enjoyed one distinctive function. It has been permitted to do the rather obviously prosaic thing of paying the bills for the idealistic culture, as any good taxpayer or philanthropically inclined individual can testify. It did this for Plato, and also for Aristotle, who had the good sense, bythe-way, to marry the richest woman in Athens. It did it for Dante and Shakespeare ; and it continues to carry on somewhat handsomely by making possible colleges, universities, libraries, churches and a myriad host of other such institutional containers of our highly prized idealistic culture. I guess it is a fact that idealistic culture has ever traveled on the back of materialistic culture. Business has never followed civilization, because there has been very little civilization without business. That first savage who had an urge for a trinket he did not own, and started bartering for it, started civilization. There is ample statistical evidence that the measure of a nation’s idealistic culture is the ability of its industrial and commercial life to pay the bills and continue to carry on. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” This classic phrase is not so much a curse as the statement of a principle. It is the principle that human life and cultural VOL.
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progress is based upon energy. In the primitive, it is the energy of human muscle, ‘(sweat of thy face.” Later, domestic animals come into use and the burden is somewhat lightened. Animal power gives him some leisure and he begins to invent simple tools. A little later simple machines propelled by man-power, and later still this “sweat of thy face ” power is supplemented by animals at the levers. Still later, steam, gas and electricity take the place of men and of animals at the levers, and a man is gradually liberated from arduous toil. He may now begin intelligently tending instead of muscularly driving the machine. As we know the machine, it is the essence of practicality applied directly to our agricultural, industrial, commercial and home life, for the purpose of changing our environment, directly; and changing our political, social and cultural life, indirectly. The machine is the very basis of our modem economic world. And while it is not all good, it is by no means all bad. Making a free use of the machine, the United States has experienced the most marvelous century and a half in the history of mankind. From 1779 to 1929, we increased our national income from $400,000,000 to over $30,000,000,000, our national wealth from approximately Q,oo,ooo,ooo to something like $375,000,000,000. The population in the meantime had grown from 3,000,000 to 120,000,000. Since 1900, the life of a generation, our families have increased from I 6,000,000 to 25000,000. We have housed 15,000,ooo in new homes, wired 20,000,000 homes for electricity, installed ~O,OOO,OO~ telephones, and have 40,000,000 people, more or less, listening to 12,ooo,ooc radios. That much of the stuff they hear is not worth listening to is no matter now. It will improve. Our progress has been remarked upon by philosopher and sage, common man and carping critic, at home and abroad. There will be more yet to remark. For despite the distressing present, we shall see a yet more glorious future. The possibilities of our cultural development are hmited only by our economic development, and our economic development is limited only by the wants of men and these are boundless, for there is no such thing as a “wantless civilization.”
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THE MACHINE
Is DOING.
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Critics of the machine and our industrialism will say that this is merely materialistic progress and may mean nothing in the cultural life of the nation. But that is exactly what it does mean. It has created the wealth and provided the leisure for our cultural advance. These critics should remember that idealistic &_&ures always flourish in those periods when people have made the greatest materialistic advance. There is good evidence for believing that the various “ Golden Ages ” in fine arts were not so much the result of literary revolts as the revolts of the well-to-do against the dead, dry, traditional cultures born of poverty and incrusted in form and ceremonial. At any rate, it is significant that the Periclean Age in Grecian history came exactly at the time when Athens was trading with a thousand posts in the Mediteranean basin and that whenshe lost this commerce, her culture went out the window. The Golden Age of Roman Literature followed close on the heels of Rome’s greatest commercial expanse. The Italian Renaissance was bought and paid for by business men who discovered the art of converting raw materials into finished products and shipping them out to the peoples of the world. Profits are as essential in a cultural expanse as the geniuses. At any rate, the geniuses have always arrived just behind the profits. But more specifically, no century and a half in historical time has made the cultural advance Western Civilization has made since 1800. In the United States, for instance, we have provided higher standards of living, unequaled political rights and privileges, a degree of social equality, a diffusion of opportunity, a scope of educational advantages, an amount of religious freedom and economic independence unprecedented in the history of the world. No nation has now, or ever has had, so many of its children in schools and colleges. In the life of one generation we have seen a Iz-hour working day go and tagged inhuman, high school attendance increase 700 per cent., college attendance increase 300 per cent., and through libraries, the press, extension courses and radio educational opportunities literally hurled at the heads of all. If it does not stick, it is not the fault of the machine, which has so largely contributed to the program by creating the wealth with which to pay for it all. Only blockheads need longer
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[J. F. I.
remain ignorant in this country. Since 1900, our savings in banks, building and loan associations increased six times, we multiplied our life insurance over 1200 per cent., and while this hard-boiled stuff was going on, our charity and philanthropy for idealistic cultural purposes rose to our tenth ranking industry ! We need not claim that the machine was the creator of this It is enough for it to say that it idealistic cultural program. created the wealth and provided the leisure that the thing might happen. For wealth and leisure are essentials in any cultural advance. Economic techniques have changed very slowly. In spite of the common error that we lived by agriculture exc2usiveZy prior to about 1800, it was the chief economic technique up to that time. Since then our adoption of the industrial technique has been rapid. While retaining sufficient of this basic industry of agriculture, the emphasis has been shifted somewhat and the fascinating achievement of American development in more recent years may be credited to production made possible by an improved agriculture and industry, both largely the result of the perfected machine. In spite of such altruistic service, our intelligentsia are bringing harsh impeachments against the machine, and it is being thrust into outer darkness by honest, tender-hearted people who feel deeply. Speaking at Leeds University in England recently, the Bishop of Ripon made a devastating onslaught on the poor old machine when he declared, “ The enemy of progress now is not so much the beast within man as the machine which has him in its grip. The machine subjects the human spirit to a mental habit, a tyrannous technique, because men move in mechanical masses.” It will be a great day for religion, not to mention the devil, when Bishops turn from preaching the beast out of men and devote their energies to converting iron and steel ! The Rev. H. P. Frost recently exclaimed, ” In this age of the machine, the shadow of a Frankenstein Monster falls like a sinister menace across the upward pathway of the race.” He is more eloquent than the Bishop, but pitched in the same key. Professor Harry E. Barnes recently declared, “The machine has confused and will finally destroy its baffled
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creator.” Mr. Austin Freeman, a widely quoted author, believes that as the machine becomes more efficient man becomes less independent and self-reliant. He becomes more regimented, his personal liberty more abated, and his sensibilities become blunted and debased. This is pretty nearly saying that it takes more mental ingenuity to drive an oxteam than an automobile. It certainly takes a different vocabulary. And Sir Philip Gibbs has said that we shall either have to kill all the scientists or reform our morals. Well, some of our morals need reforming. They always have. But as bad as they are, I am in favor of giving our scientists one more chance. Professor Edward A. Ross in his ” Outline of Sociology ” says “the factory locksteps the worker,” that the product of the machine is impersonal, and that “artists agree that machine production for the market is without the interest excited by hand production for an individual and that the products are neither sign$icant nor beautiful.” If anything in this world has been glorified out of all People who wax eloquent about the reason, it is handcrafts. character of the worker and the beauty and personalization of the product of the handcraft days should reread their history to learn what handcraft workers put up with, and reexamine with critical eye the artistry of some of the products. But, mind you, there is nothing new in all of this. Carlyle hated invention. Thackery despised the machine. Tennyson found new metaphors with which to damn the machine. Browning soundly disliked science and all of its doings while optimistically exclaiming, “God’s in His Heaven, All’s right with the world.” Yet at that very moment his fellow men were naked and hungry in the streets for want of what the machine could have given them, and dying from simple contagions caused by the lack of simple sanitation which science could have supplied. Such is the idealism of poets and philosophers, however. They will have their whims. Goethe saw red every time he saw a cotton mill, but he enjoyed his fine clothes woven by the hands of peasants who toiled sixteen hours a day and often went hungry into the bargain, that this intellectual peacock might look the part. Matthew Arnold contemptuously referred to the machine of his day as “producing an unspiritual civilization,” while Victorian England
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JAMES SHELBY
THOMAS.
[J. F. I.
constantly preached the return to nature and the simple life of In an earlier day in the life of this Republic, a renunciation. wisdom-laden school board out in Ohio refused to allow a group of young people in the neighborhood the use of the school house for a debate as to whether railroads would be a good thing for Ohio on the grounds that if the Lord had meant for people to ride through the countryside of Ohio at the death-dealing rate of twelve miles per hour, he most certainly would have said something about it in the Bible. Many years later, a goodly old farmer in the same State refused to buy a mowing machine from a traveling salesman on the grounds that the Bible says, ” In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread,” and since no man could possibly sweat riding a comfortable seat while mowing his meadow in Ohio, he would have none of this machine stuff. It is not of record why the salesman did not tell him the Bible is also silent on the matter of smoking a pipe. He probably never had attended a short course in salesmanship ! Laborers in England as late as I 860 went into the mills of England and broke up the machines in the textile mills. Basically, this is the same argument which we use when we attempt to limit production by individuals to make the job last longer. And so it goes. The machine is anathema. Our intelligentsia, that interesting group among us who are so busy formulating a philosophy about life which will justify themselves in having nothing to do with it, that they have no time left to take any part in it, have gone into the automobile factories, have there counted the holes a man can drill in a wheel-rim in one minute with an automatic drill. Being good at figures, they multiply this by 60 and this by 8 and this by 6 and, having conclusively arrived at an astoundingly enormous number of holes the man can drill in a week, they instantly conclude that this is too many holes and that the machine is, therefore, a monster. Being as clever with words as they are with figures, they proceed to write vehemently of a “mechanized civilization,” a “machine-bound man,” “handcuffed to the machine” with such other appealing notes in supposed defense of the poor, enslaved, bedeviled, “ machine-cursed ” laborer, that they drive tender-hearted ladies to tears and reformers to the platforms.
Mar., 1933.1
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Our progress has produced growing pains. Masses of men have confounded the natural adjustments of a rapidly developing technique based on science and the machine with an earlier technique based on handcrafts and have found fault with the newer tempo of life because it entertains different ideals and ways of living. To these, the machine is a Frankenstein Monster and will ultimately destroy us. It should be enough to observe that the original ” Monster ” was only a fiction and that the modern machine is the most altruistic thing in modern life. But the critics pile Ossa on Pelion. The machine has given us our factories. Factories have given us our cities. Cities have given us ‘our business system, and our business system has given us our wealth. It is no matter to the intelligentsia that all civilizations are city-made. They cynically exclaim that business adds nothing to civilization; that business is a distressing force and that loftier aspirations are crushed by it. Industrialism and avarice are “ buddies” and “ clinking coins have no place in the music of aspirations.” We are told that the marketplace is no place to look for civilization. Business and the “machine civilization” which produced it are both bad, and “soul-killing” industrialism is terrible. “ Big Business,” which seems to be in hiding just now, is especially distasteful to the critics of the machine, though I have no doubt they will be glad to see it when it reappears. Of course the facts are that “Big Business” is relatively smaller today than ever before in the history of the world. One dollar out of every four we earn in this country goes to 50,ooo tax-gathering and tax-spending agencies, in addition to hundreds of millions more for philanthropy, our tenth ranking industry. So it is, that a larger proportion of our wealth goes for culture than was true of any nation in the ancient world. We are told that the total income of Rome for any one year in the Augustan Age was only 5 per cent. of New York City’s last year’s budget ! What we have in this country is Big Culture, and if our intelligentsia don’t watch out, they will discover who pays for their bread! There is nothing new in any of this. The Bishop of Ripon and Goethe say exactly what Ghandi says. But having taken
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SHELBY
THOMAS.
[J.F. I.
a bicycle home with him from England, this modern saint will find he has started something he cannot stop, and by this act of improving his personal transportation he automatically disqualifies himself to speak with authority. We may charitably suspend judgment upon all these critics of the machine until we learn more about their mode of living. However, as a matter of courteous suggestion, born entirely of a desire to serve, we may be pardoned for suggesting that these gentlemen all take a trip to Thibet, Afghanistan, or Patagonia, where there is no machinery at all, and where there is no “ tyrannous technique ” to harass them. However, some of this criticism needs examining. There are some features about the machine none too pleasant to contemplate. But it does have defenses, and they are soundly rational and historically accurate. In the first place, it is a common fallacy that we have the only ” industrial civilization ” which has ever existed. On the contrary, all civilizations have been industrial. There is no other way for them to exist. They have differed only in degree and intensity and the variations in them have been determined almost entirely by the wants of men at a given time. The quality of life and the culture produced has invariably depended upon the success of the commercial and industrial period and its duration. The greater the wealth produced in the period, the greater the contemporary culture. And culture is always contemporaneous with the commercial and industrial growth of any civilization. Phoenicians sent caravans trading to the Orient. Incidentally, they brought back an alphabet and sent culture on its way a thousand years. Culture always follows business. Business has been the forerunner of every great civilization which the world has known. But, more specifically, the intelligentsia tell us: I. That there is no beauty in the machine. The Leviathan has no Poets like ready-made metaphors. creaky wooden hull, no greasy decks, no knotted cordage, no patched canvas bellying to the breeze. So the modern poet turns up his nose at her because her comfort is too comfortable;
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1933.1
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her efficiency too efficient; her safety too safe. A Viking Long Boat would inspire this modern poet, but not the Europa. The facts are, however, that the automobile is as beautiful as any chariot ever driven by ancient charioteer, and the modern liner surpasses in beauty any fantastic tub that ever tested cordage or the courage of a mariner, while the airplane is as beautiful as the flying bird itself, and a modern passenger engine is a work of art. 2.
The machine
destroys artistry in the product.
On the contrary, the machine is democratizing art. The man in the street today wears a more artistic shoe than Henry VIII ; and the King picked his shoes with the same discriminating care he did his women. A modern electric range is a more artistic piece of furniture than the dressing table of Mary, Queen of Scats, if only you forget we use the range to fry bacon and she used the dressing table to make up on. Through the reproduction of artistic tapestries in wallpaper, the machine has made it well-nigh impossible to go into a first-class paper store and buy an ugly roll of wallpaper. The machine is not destroying art. It is democratizing it by making accessible to all men artistic forms of the necessities and luxuries of modem life. Fundamentally, this is the objection the intelligentsia have to the machine. It is making art, learning and leisure accessible to all men, and hitherto these have been the exclusive prized possessions of the intellectual classes. The products of the machine are artistic. 3. There is nothing human in the machine. It is crushing the life out of men, reducing them to mere robots, keeping them “handcuffed to the machine,” making mere automatons of them. This is just too bad! The facts are the machine is the most humane thing yet contrived by man, and has far outstripped his philosophy or his altruism in freeing man from arduous toil and slavery. Aristotle accepted human slavery as did our own forebears. The altruism of the Christian religion, with the challenge of its master that all men are brothers constantly ringing in its ears for centuries, complacently accepted human slavery and
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waited until the machine made the system economically impossible before “rising up to strike off the shackles” of human slavery. To face a fact, it must be said that human slavery has persisted longest in those civilizations where the agrarian life So true is this, was the predominant economic technique. that even ex-slaves from America returning to Africa using only handcrafts and machineless agriculture have adopted a system which the machine liberated them from, and there is good evidence for the fact that many of the evils of tenant farming are nothing more than a throw-back from a slave agriculture, for the curve of tenant farming invariably diminishes as the curve representing the use of machines on the farm increases. Time was not so long ago when 16 hours was a legal day’s work. The machine has made this inhumane. Altruism never freed slaves. Where hand-labor, with its “ennobling influences” persists, the majorities are dangerously close to slavery yet. Any intelligent traveler will find this out if he will take a swing around the circuit outside Western Civilization where the machine has revolutionized norms of thinking, standards of living, and customs of conduct. What the intelligentsia seem to want are “the good old days ” when the cobbler worked at his bench 16 hours, ate three meals at his work, and lived in a stuffy, airless room and enjoyed his “creative freedom.” Great stuff, that ! London, 200 years ago, was largely one of these “ideal handcraft” cities of the “good old days” variety. Then the industrial artists had “pride in their work” and disease in their systems-for the death rate under those “ideal working conditions” was 50 to each 1,000 of the population as against 123 today under the machine. The machine has brought life, not death, as the critics of the machine would have us believe. To our intelligentsia, wielding a sledge-hammer IO to 12 hours a day in a sooty blacksmith shop is ennobling. But to sit on a comfortable seat in a well-heated and ventilated factory manipulating with a delicate lever a trip-hammer is very debasing. The tenant farmer in America is nearer this “ideal handcraft” stage than any man among us. From 50 to 7.5 per
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cent. of these must turn over half of all they have made to the landlord. Lord, deliver us from such “ ideal hand-crafts ” ! Oscar Wilde says, “The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. . . . Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.” Here is a poet with a sociological background. Here is real intelligentsiaism! 4. That we are a nation of mere machine tenders. In IgIo we had 41,615,ooo people employed in the United States; 7,972,OOO of these were workers in factories, while 827,000 more worked at other enterprises connected with factories, giving a total of about g,ooo,ooo men and women engaged in working with and about machines. Of these nearly nine millions, the highest estimate we have seen of actual machine tenders is 4,500,000. Our population in 1910 was 10571 I ,000. The “machine tenders,” therefore, amounted to only about 4+ per cent. of the population, or 13 per cent. of the total number of employed persons in the United States. We do not concede it, but granting that this 13 per cent. of employed were more or less slaves to the machine, it is interesting to compare the conditions that existed in the Periclean Age of Greece, where there were 5,000,ooo free men and 12,000,000 slaves. It took 70 per cent. of the population as human slaves to produce the Golden Age of Athenian culture, whereas only about 4$. per cent. of our population work at the machine, and I maintain it is neither so strenuous nor as enslaving as ordinary labor in the open fields or in the blacksmith shop. As a matter of fact, machine tenders are decreasing. In 1928, there were 1,250,ooo fewer men in factories than in 1923, and ‘28 was one of our busiest recent years. This does not mean that fewer men were at work, although popular opinion has put this construction upon it. It only means that fewer men were at work in factories and fewer men were tending machines, for during the same period we added directly more than 2,000,ooo men and women to our payrolls, who were working at new trades and new enterprises which the higher development of the machine had made possible. Directly and indirectly, the figures are nearer 4,000,000.
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5. The factory system is undermining the health of industrial civilizations. It is interesting to observe that, with modem machines, ventilated factories and a regard for the health of the “machine bound” man, the healthiest occupation in all England is the manufacture of glue and fertilizer. The most modem machine on the horizon is found in the electrical field. The death rate among electrical workers is exactly 50 per cent. below that of the country at large. Following the glue and fertilizer workers, there come in order of health, electrical workers, preachers, gardeners, farmers, teachers, doctors, lawyers. It is suggested for health’s sake, that the lawyers invent some machine for administering justice. It would be healthier and might be equally just! As a matter of fact, the workers in soap factories outrank in health all of the workers in the professions just enumerated. There has been a good deal of “ballyhoo” about the evil effects of the machine upon men’s physical health and upon his mental and spiritual attitudes toward life. The linotype machine was invented in 1887. At that time typesetters were working twelve to fourteen hours a day. By 1903, there were 7,500 of these machines in use. The hours for setting type had been reduced from 14 to 8. The wages increased 20 per cent. The death rate decreased 30 per cent. A very unhealthy thing, this linotype machine! As a matter of fact, the mental and spiritual outlook upon life is very closely related to physical health. Noting much of the choleric stuff now coming from the critics of the machine, and seeing that the health tables are all against them as compared with machine workers, we suggest that they take up tending the ” deadly machine ” for a while until they regain sufficient health to get their livers going. Accidents are closely related to health. Today, in the “machine-made” world, there are fewer accidents to the man who works than ever before in the history of civilization. The records prove this in spite of the fact that in an earlier day only major accidents were reported while today all accidents are reported. One thread factory in this country went IO,OOO,OOO man-hours without a lost-time accident. Many plants go for months and years with not so much as one losttime accident.
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Mr. Frederick Ecker’s Metropolitan Life Insurance Company has just announced among its industrial policy holders the lowest death rate in all history. Abe Martin says somewhere in his collection of classical nonsense that it is funny how a man with facts can break up an argument. This Metropolitan fact is just too bad for critics of the “ deadly machine.” 6. The machine
throws men out of work.
Philosophically, the best answer to this criticism is, that this is exactly the glory of the machine-it does the work of men and thus releases them for more interesting pursuits. Many idealists wish it were possible to do all the work of the world with the machine. It has already demonstrated its usefulness by abolishing actual human slavery and releasing other millions from 14 to 16 hour days to 8 and 9 hour days. But that the machine “throws men out of work” is another one of those ” perfectly self-evident propositions” which does not happen to be true. Turning to England for a moment, because the figures have been carefully recorded there by the Government for more than a hundred years, and taking its largest industry,’ textiles, we find that it took 320 persons to spin as much in 1769 as one man could spin in 1840. But in 1855, just 15 years later, one man could spin as much as 700 men could spin in 1769. Arkwright invented the first, spinning machine in 1855. That is the year we have one man spinning as much as 700 men could spin just 86 years before. According to the argument of the man in the street, this is throwing 699 men out of work in the lifetime of one octogenarian. But this is a piece with much of the logic of the man in the street. He feels his thoughts. But have a look at the facts in the case: TABLE Men Employed in Textile Industry.
Year. 1835..
218,000
1847.. 1850.. *1856 1862.. 1870..
I 874. 1878.. 1885. 1890. 1895.. 1907. 1914..
I.
In England.
316,000 331,000 *379,000 (Year
. .
. ..
450,000
. . 479,600 . 483,000 . . . 504,000 .
.
451,000
526,800 538,900 677,000 689,000
after Arkwright
invented first spinning machine)
JAMES SHELBY THOMAS.
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[J. F. I.
There was a steady growth of employment in an industry in which the improvement of the machine was going forward at a faster rate, perhaps, than the machines of any other industry. In 1831 the population But this does not tell all of the story. By 191 I, the population had of England was 24,028,584. This means that while the population grown to 45221,615. This does not ~wasdoubling, the cotton workers were trebling. look as though the improved machine was causing unemployment. But someone will advance the idea that the cotton trade in England presents the exceptional case. I wonder if it does. The makers of machines, tools, engines, mill-wrights, fitters, watchmakers, turners, and such like people have had the same experience. In England, the 14 “Engineering Trades” show the same thing. Let’s have a look at what has happened to these workers: TABLE Number Year. 1871 1881. 1891. 1901. 1911.
M&s.
222,594 253,994 323,327 507,782 564,994
II.
of Persons
Females.
12,900 13,982 18,904 22,738 37,413
Employed.
Total.
235.584 267,976 342,231 530,520 602,407
Decennial Increases.
13-7% 27.7 55.0 13.5
Here again, we have the same result. The number of persons employed increased all the time while the machines were being improved all the time. A mere glance at the decennial increases shows that the number of people employed in 14 engineering trades in England increased much faster than the population increased. Taking the four periods in which the percentage of increase could be figured, the last four, we find that the average increase for the four is 27.475 per cent., which, of course, is far beyond the populational increase for the same period. But there are also figures for the trade that has made the most rapid advance in perfecting the machines, the printing trade. The advance in technique in this trade has been little
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short of marvelous. Yet when the figures for printing and distribution of the product are taken into consideration, the same conclusion is reached. It is estimated that the manhours necessary now to bind ‘a thousand books are only onethird of what they were just thirty years ago. There are figures on this trade which show that improving the machine puts men and women to work, not out of work. Examine the following table-figures taken from the English census again : TABLE
III.
Number of Persons Employed.
Year. -~___~ ;;g; 1891.. 1901.. 1911..
::
Males.
Females.
Total.
66,071 57,484 8,587 74,542 12,941 871483 102,082 19,125 121,207
119,834 140,968
29,959 43,107
149,793 184,075
Decennial Increase.
32.4% 38.5 23.5
23.0
Publishers, Book-Sellers and News Dealers.
14,163 16,865 23,394 31,972
4047
These figures show a constant increase of employment even at a more rapid rate than the populational increases. Truth is, that most of our apprehensions about the machine putting large numbers of people out of work is based on the false assumption that demand for goods will become stationary. Quite the reverse is true. There is no good reason for assuming that desire for the good things of life will suddenly cease. Thirty years from now, huge fortunes will be made out of new patents not now in the Patent Offices of the world. Now printing, with the engineering trades, is perhaps most The most cursory subject to the influence of invention. examination of the advance in technique in these trades will reveal a real epic of progress. Combining printing and engineering trades in England, and calculating the percentages of increase in employment in them over a period of forty years, we get not unemployment, but a steady increase of employment. Only once did population increase faster than the number of persons engaged in engineering. This was the period from But these trades more than made up for this 1871 to 1881.
264
TABLE
Year. 1871...... 1881...... x891...... I~oI...... 1911......
[J. F. I.
JAMES SHELBY THOMAS.
Populational InCreaSe. 13.21% 14.36 11.65 12.17 10.89
IV.
Increase in Engineering Trades.
Increase in Printing.
-
-
13.7% 27.7
32.4% 38.5
13.5
23.0
55.0
23.5
decc-nnial in the three following periods. From 1891 to 1901, the engineering trades increased the workers by 55.0 per cent. The printing trades have had a steady increase, which only means that more people were reading and were being told in much of what they read that the machine was going to upset civilization! At the very time, it was employing more and more men to print and distribute the very stuff designed to show what an awful menace a modern press is! It is not very convincing. It is revealed by British statistics that the total number employed in industry (and all trades affected by the invention of new and modem machines are included) increased during the thirty years between 1881 and 191 I from 6,373,ooo persons to g,468,ooo. This is the astounding rate of 48 per cent. for the period. But the population of England for the same period increased only 38 per cent. But for the strident voices of the calamity howlers, the ghost of unemployment as caused by the machine could be forgotten. Of course the fact is that but for the machine, England’s population could not have increased 38 per cent. in the thirty-year period between 1881 and 191 I. And for a very good reason. The country could not possibly have supported them. Starvation, or peasant standards of living for all, is the alternative right now between that state and the best machines possible. The causes of our present unemployment plight cannot be charged to the machine. There are plenty of other reasons for this depression. Some people have become so excited about the machine they are not thinking. Wanting a scapegoat, they approach the thicket and lo, the machine! Coming to a consideration of some home figures, what do we find? Throughout the history of the industrial era, this
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problem of the repercussions of greater efficiency in manufacturing processes incident to the use of machines has been ,Fver recurring. To epitomize the development of productivity from 1919 to 1925, both for industry and for the individual worker, the Department of Commerce has given us the following summary, in Table V: TABLE V. Industries 1925.
Index of Increased Productivity in Manufacturing (IgIg egU& Vehicles for Land Transportation.
IO0
Physical Volume of Production.
Production Per Person.
I I --
Vehicles-Land Trot.. . :. ............ Rubber. ........ Metal and Metal, Products other than Iron and Steel ........... Stone, Clay, Glass.
............. Tobacco Mfg ................... Chemical, Allied Products. ...... Food and Allied Products. ...... Paper and Printing. ............ Iron and Steel. ................ Lumber ....................... Textile and Products. .......... Leather and Its Mfgs ........... Ship and Boat Bldg ............. All Industries.
.................
283.3 158.3
108.3 79.7
182.5 152.8
220.0 199.3
132.4 179.1 124.4 140.6 116.4 152.8 131.5 113.6 119.3 93.4 7.0
81.2 115.1
114.0 151.5 97.0 147.1 115.8 131.1 114.1 86.9 126.6 106.9 54.8
163.1 155.6 155.7 153.2 143.2 140.4 137.6 120.7 I 14.2 103.1 51.8
128.6
91.4
121.8
140.7
$:;: 81.3 108.8 95.6 94.1 104.5 90.6 13.3
-_
1.
Again, on the basis of 1914 as 100, the following table shows the advances in the output per worker in certain leading industries for the period 1914 to 1925: TABLE VI. Industry. Iron and Steel Industry: As a Whole ...................... Blast Furnaces. .................. Steel Works and Rolling Mills. .... Boots and Shoes. .................... Leather Tanning. .................... Slaughtering and Meat Packing. ....... Petroleum Refining. .................. Paper and Wood Pulp. ............... .............. Cement Manufacturing. ........................ Automobiles. Rubber Tires. ....................... Flour Milling. ....................... Cane Sugar Refining .................. VOL. 215, NO. 1287-19
Per Cent. Increase
in IndividualOutput.
... .. . .
.. ..
.
‘.’
59 54 (to 1923)
.
5z
“’
.
.
.
. .
I
.
.
. . .
. . ...
“’
26 27 83
364 172 . ..ZII . . 36 . . 28
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Meanwhile, for the same period, productivity for steam railroads increased 40 per cent. per man-hour, train and engine crews alone about 34 per cent. In bituminous coal mining, the individual efficiency increased 25 per cent. between 1915 and 1925. There has been increased efficiency caused by better management and more modern machines. Far from being a cause for criticism, it is a consumation devoutly to be wished. The National Industrial Conference Board, in making a study of mass production in the United States recently, brought to light some interesting facts in Comparing the Iinited States with Great Britain. The Board takes eight leading industries and compares the horsepower per wage earner, and the value added per wage earner and finds that the advantages in production and value added are all with this It also finds that there has been little increase in country. mechanization of industry in Great Britain for the 17 years ending 1924. But in these eight leading industries, it finds on the basis of 1913 prices the output per worker in 1917 was $1,540 in England as against $1,740 in 1924, an increase of $200 or 13 per cent. per worker. During practically the same period, we had an increase per worker of 35 per cent. The Board states, “Eight selected major manufacturing industries in the United States which use an average of I+ as much horsepower per wage earner employed as do the same industries in Great Britain, turn out, largely as a result of this greater use of power, from 23 to 3 times as much production per wage earner employed. This greater productivity per worker accounts largely for the higher wage levels and living standards prevailing in the United States. . . . ” Now it will be evident that, in spite of the greater mechanization of industry in this country than prevailed during the same period in Great Britain, unemployment began in Britain before it did here, attained its worst proportion sooner than it did here, and has retained its greater magnitude in proportion to the number of employed persons. If the machine has been the cause of our present unemployment, as a Cabinet Member and at least two of our United States Senators recently declared, we should have far outstripped Great Britain, as our mechanization since the World War has been much more rapid. But this is not the case.
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This advancing efficiency, and the drop in American industry from wartime inflation, had between 1920 and 1928 put 917,000 men out of work. 1 am using Government figures, Department of Commerce. If to these we add ~OO,OOO in the decline of employes in agriculture, only a part of whom may be charged to machines, and the 240,000 relieved from railroads, we arrive at a formidable figure of nearly 2,000,000. Too many social reformers are overwhelmed with these figures and go no further. But it is only half of the story. For instance, between 1920 and 1928, there was an increase in the number of workers in servicing and driving automobiles of 760,000, including IOO,OOO bus drivers, a vocation which did not exist in 1914. Th ere were Ioo,ooo more insurance agents in 1928 than in 1919. These additional men were made necessary by the large expanse which took place in insurable fields incident to new industry and trades. Electric refrigeration, light and power, and oil heating establishments have increased employment by another IOO,OOO. Between 1919 and 1928, another IOO,OOOwere added through construction There were 232,000 more teachers work and management. and professors required to look after the young in 1928 than in 1919. Motion picture servitors (not production employes) added another I 25,000. Barbers and hairdressers to the tune of 170,000, and personal service in hotels and restaurants, 750,000, and radio, 200,000. Thus it appears from the facts that, while we were displacing in America 1,957,ooo people through increased efficiency made possible by the machine, we were adding in new trades and professions 2,527,OOO people! The difference just accounts for the increase in population during the period. Hence it is that as the machine becomes more and more efficient, the new service functions not only offset unemployment, but indicate a larger per capita earning power and thus increase the standards of living. The machine plus brains equals goods, comforts and wealth. This formula increased factory production almost 60 per cent. between 1900 and I 925, and the same thing happened on the railroads, in the mines, and on the farms. The perfection of the tool has measured the speed of man’s upward journey from
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[J.1;.1.
the Stone Age to now. Considering all industries in the United States, 71 workers in 1925 could produce as much as 109 could produce just 25 years before, and while working from 5 to I0 per cent. less time. Just here is the crowning glory of the machine. Let us be quick to admit that the productive output per worker has increased, that fewer men in a given field can do more work. But having admitted this much, there is no use being stampeded by the intelligentsia. To reduce the hours a man works in this world has always been considered a desirable thing to do. If the machine enables him to do more work in less time, it proves itself humane, not a menace. If this criticism of the machine were confined to journalistic opinion it would be bad enough. But when a Cabinet Officer and a United States Senator inject it into debate and ascribe our present unemployment to its baneful influence, it becomes just too bad. They are even quoting figures from railways and industry to prove their point. However, they say nothing about unemployment in fields where little or no machines are used and conveniently overlook the new fields for labor brought in by the machine.. The hammer chorus is growing louder and is anything but harmonious. We must also admit that a similar relative contraction of the number of employed took place in railroading, mining, and other enterprises. Though it must be said in defense of the machine that much of the mine labor was not needed because of a decline in the demand for coal. The total decline in men employed in manufacturing between 1920 and 1928 was 917,000, which added to those displaced in railroading, mining and farming gives us approximately 2 ,ooo,ooo men displaced through over-expansion incident to the war and the increased efficiency of the machine and factory management. Admitted. These are only fractional data. But they are much more convincing than the Frankenstein Monster talk. They prove somewhat conclusively that as the machine grows more efficient, hours of labor grow less, goods get cheaper and better, and the only limitless thing in the world, human wants, expands to demand sufficient additional goods to keep everybody at work, provided we behave as we should.
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“ Technocracy ” has recently given us some interesting statistical evidence for what we have all along known in a general way. The technique for obtaining a living and the amount of living obtained per person changed very little from the dawn of history until about 1800, say; but now we find the average citizen of the United States consuming 75 times what he did in 1800, and about 66 per cent. of this increase has been in one generation, or since 1900. Some assume our present distress is due to this large use of energy, and predict worse to come. This is equivalent to saying a man should work 12 or 14 hours per day with his hands to get food, clothing and shelter, and poor food, poor clothing and poor shelter at that, as he did in the days of Menes, Alcibides, or Napoleon. ‘’Technocracy ” affirms that besides the 2,000 calories a day necessary for existence, man is now using 150,000 calories in addition to the 2,000 he consumes as food. This is good. It means that after some 7,000, or more, years of life on 2,000 calories, and frequently bad calories at that, as, for instance, putrid meat before the days of refrigeration, the evidence of which may be observed about the middle of the figures on any English etching of reasonably early date, man made up his mind to live some and went out and dug up 150,000 more calories which, while he could not eat them, were very useful in supporting homes, colleges, radios, travel and as thouand and one other things more or less useful and always interesting. The same authority quotes more figures to show how very rapidly we have developed energy for our uses, and adds that if we used the most efficient method of production only 30 per cent. of the people now employed would be needed to do the job. Since about 38,000,000 now work in normal times the most efficient methods would mean 20,000,000 people would not be needed unless new inventions should bring in new enterprises. This would make a jobless army, indeed! If But there is no need to surrender the point so quickly. 30 per cent. of our present workers can do all we need done, it For it is a simple device to keep should be quickly welcomed. all workers and shorten the hours, thus providing leisure for any sort of creative work the soul desires. The same authorities apply their findings to the automobile industry, saying that had it not been for the improved methods
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in that industry, the industry alone would have offered work for from 2,500,000 to 4,ooo,ooo, just about the number added by population growth since 1904. What is overlooked here is that you cannot use more than IO per cent. of your total working force to supply you with only one means of transportation and get away with it. The cost of cars under such a program would make them prohibitive to the average man. Professor Charles A. Beard has recently said, “A knowledge of the good life is our certain philosophic heritage, and technology has given us a greater power over nature which enables us to provide the conditions of the good life for all the earth’s multitudes. That seems to me to be the most engaging possibility of the drama, and faith in the potentialities keeps me working at it even in the worst hours of disallusionment.” Since Edward Carpenter wrote his “ Civilization, Its Cause and Cure,” and tried to exemplify to Victorians what he was talking about by living outside the conventional creed of his day, we have had plenty of critics of our civilization by people from the outside. Morris, Ruskin, and a thousand others have indulged themselves thus. But only recently, Sir Alfred Ewing, immediate President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, has spoken from the inside and he declares with reference to science, “The command of Nature has been put into Man’s hands before he knows how to command himself.” Discovery and invention have moved with lightning-like rapidity during the last one hundred years. But this is nothing to be excited about. Our material advance always leads the way for institutional change. I have no apprehensions about our ability to control science and to Indeed, the very rapidity with properly use the machine. which science and the machine have moved is good for us. It makes possible what will be the greatest cultural advance the world has ever known. But the machine has some positive arguments it may modestly advance to justify its place in the sun. In the first place, it is a great educational force. It has reduced the physical fact of this world to a readily reached neighborhood and the mental, racial, economic and political facts of the world to a community problem. It has widened the outlook and emphasized the relations of men. Isolation is now as
Mar., 1933.1
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simple as it is impossible. The railroads, autos, and airplanes are taking us everywhere. The telephone, telegraph, and the radio are telling us everything. Today, the workers’ relation to the world is what it used to be to his little community, and for the first time in human history the working man has been given some leisure to read, study and develop a hobby. The machine has been a fairy godmother to the toiler. Today the problem of education is not so much to teach the man how to work, as to teach the wise use of the leisure the machine has given him. Psychologically, there is something in the machine which calls out the best there is in us. If you drive a car yourself, you are alert, observant, active. There are definite characterbuilding processes going on in such an enterprise. The comfort of the machine is something. The reaction of the human being to it is much more. The machine forces and demands a certain amount of intelligent interest. Machine workers rarely go insane. Few of them find it necessary to leave their jobs because of mental disorders. In wellorganized industry, ,there are recreational opportunities such as play-grounds, tennis courts, moving pictures, cafeterias where ideas are exchanged and social intercourse indulged in, and many other opportunities for wholesome living. In this connection, it will be helpful to observe that approximately 90 per cent. of the women confined in asylums of the Southeast are for melancholia, and come from the quietude of the farm-so beautifully written about by the poets, and on which so few poets care to live. There is no danger that the machine will master the man. The man created the machine. He will be silly indeed to let it master him. The triumph of the material over the spiritual would be a tragedy. We have traveled faster and gone farther toward providing the material comforts of life in a hundred years than the Old World did in forty centuries. There is some evidence among us of sensation hunting. This is too bad. But it is a mere rash. We like sensations. Our heroes must be giants. Our recreation must be hair-raising, our social life showy and spectacular, and our religion “hellbusting.” This is the result of the speed by which we have come where we are. But it is not so bad. Our very speed has
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brought us to the gates of a sparkling culture. The materialistic splendor of the background assures an original cultural pattern. It will be the best unwritten culture the world ever saw. The “deadly machine” is responsible for the background. America is young. It is scarce 300 years since the Pilgrims landed here. We are still adolescing. But what a soil, what a country, what a wealth to carry a new culture!
IS DOING
TO MANKIND.*
BY JAMES Economist
SHELBY
for Commonwealth
THOMAS,
and Southern
LL.D.,
Corporation
of New York.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: I am not unmindful of the great honor you confer upon me by this invitation to address this very distinguished society, The Franklin Institute. We live in an atmosphere today particularly conducive to critics. We seem to have plenty of the stuff of which they are born. Verily, our achievements of liberty are great. We think as we please. The mass-man has been released and is going places. He and his self-appointed spokesmen are attacking everything, the machine and industrialism included. Well, this attacking business is a pleasant and exhilarating exercise. For while we attack, we have no need of doubt and less for constructive planning. We only need to affirm vehemently that whatever is, is wrong. The spell of indignation is upon us. We unconsciously become the high priests of evangelism and change. Change of what sort? It is no matter. Any sort, just so it is change. “Tear down and you will build something better” is the favorite axiom of critical philosophers, though by now Greece and Rome have good reason for doubting its truth. It is to be observed, however, that the philosopher always leaves the work of reconstruction to more practical people. In the wake of this criticism generally, the machine and industrialism have been caught up in a perfect barrage of disparaging pronouncements, and for the moment both seem to be faring badly. The criticism may be more marked in my section of the country, The Deep South, because our cultural pattern has been determined largely by an almost exclusive agricultural technique only yesterday emerged from the * Presented at the Stated Meeting held Wednesday, 247
November
16, 1932.
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slavery type so persistent in exclusively agricultural countries. This explains more of the tenant system, incidentally, than some of us are willing to admit. For twenty years I have been an ardent advocate of the larger industrialization of the South. In this work it has become necessary from time to time to point out to an unbalanced population, 75 per cent. of which is rural, the It is for this benefits to be derived from industrialization. reason that I am now defending the machine and industrialism, the beneficial effects of which are being seriously questioned by many in my section of the country. It is world Nor is this criticism peculiar to the South. wide. The intelligentsia of the most industrialized countries of the world are merciless in their criticisms of the machine. Fundamentally, here is the reason for much of the criticism of ‘science and the machine. We invent our machines, we use them, they work, we accept them. We inherit our institutions and metaphors and, therefore, must save them. Physically, we are neighbors. Psychologically,. we are far apart. Our philosophical ideals are slow to change. The machine is not only indifferent to accepted philosophies, but impatient with them. It always wants to be getting on. The philosophy of restless change so characteristic of Western Civilization was begot by science and nurtured into huskiness by the machine. The chief characteristic of Western Civilization has been its belief in science and the machine. It dares look facts in the face, and then do something about it. On the other hand, the Oriental has attempted to solve his problems by metaphysical speculation with no recognition of the material forces which play about him and in his futile attempt to explain the universe thus, he has been driven to the philosophy of defeatism. There are evidences today that we of the West are getting tired and nothing is so tragic as a tired, discouraged, decaying culture. The use of the machine has created many problems for us. But hitherto, we have liked problems. Industry, which so widely uses science and the machine, must not neglect its social responsibility. Industry has created many of our religious, moral, political, and social problems. The machine
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has changed our occupations, hours of labor, delights, recreations, social and religious ideals. Philosophers are being forced to take cognizance of these changes, and they are in none too good humor about it. Indeed, they are just now giving the machine fits. Things go on about our very heads without our knowing it. People and races are rarely conscious of the beginnings of their culture and more rarely conscious of its development. There are two types of culture among all people-an idealistic culture about which everybody raves, and a materialistic culture about which nobody raves. Yet we all work at these two cultures, philosopher, sage, industrialist and laborer alike. The idealistic culture finds expression in religion, philosophy, and the fine arts. The materialistic culture is embodied in science, invention, machines, industry and commerce. Both types of culture blend to make the general cultural pattern a people enjoy and we all work together to produce that pattern. The materialistic culture has always enjoyed one distinctive function. It has been permitted to do the rather obviously prosaic thing of paying the bills for the idealistic culture, as any good taxpayer or philanthropically inclined individual can testify. It did this for Plato, and also for Aristotle, who had the good sense, bythe-way, to marry the richest woman in Athens. It did it for Dante and Shakespeare ; and it continues to carry on somewhat handsomely by making possible colleges, universities, libraries, churches and a myriad host of other such institutional containers of our highly prized idealistic culture. I guess it is a fact that idealistic culture has ever traveled on the back of materialistic culture. Business has never followed civilization, because there has been very little civilization without business. That first savage who had an urge for a trinket he did not own, and started bartering for it, started civilization. There is ample statistical evidence that the measure of a nation’s idealistic culture is the ability of its industrial and commercial life to pay the bills and continue to carry on. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” This classic phrase is not so much a curse as the statement of a principle. It is the principle that human life and cultural VOL.
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progress is based upon energy. In the primitive, it is the energy of human muscle, ‘(sweat of thy face.” Later, domestic animals come into use and the burden is somewhat lightened. Animal power gives him some leisure and he begins to invent simple tools. A little later simple machines propelled by man-power, and later still this “sweat of thy face ” power is supplemented by animals at the levers. Still later, steam, gas and electricity take the place of men and of animals at the levers, and a man is gradually liberated from arduous toil. He may now begin intelligently tending instead of muscularly driving the machine. As we know the machine, it is the essence of practicality applied directly to our agricultural, industrial, commercial and home life, for the purpose of changing our environment, directly; and changing our political, social and cultural life, indirectly. The machine is the very basis of our modem economic world. And while it is not all good, it is by no means all bad. Making a free use of the machine, the United States has experienced the most marvelous century and a half in the history of mankind. From 1779 to 1929, we increased our national income from $400,000,000 to over $30,000,000,000, our national wealth from approximately Q,oo,ooo,ooo to something like $375,000,000,000. The population in the meantime had grown from 3,000,000 to 120,000,000. Since 1900, the life of a generation, our families have increased from I 6,000,000 to 25000,000. We have housed 15,000,ooo in new homes, wired 20,000,000 homes for electricity, installed ~O,OOO,OO~ telephones, and have 40,000,000 people, more or less, listening to 12,ooo,ooc radios. That much of the stuff they hear is not worth listening to is no matter now. It will improve. Our progress has been remarked upon by philosopher and sage, common man and carping critic, at home and abroad. There will be more yet to remark. For despite the distressing present, we shall see a yet more glorious future. The possibilities of our cultural development are hmited only by our economic development, and our economic development is limited only by the wants of men and these are boundless, for there is no such thing as a “wantless civilization.”
Mar., 1933.1
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Critics of the machine and our industrialism will say that this is merely materialistic progress and may mean nothing in the cultural life of the nation. But that is exactly what it does mean. It has created the wealth and provided the leisure for our cultural advance. These critics should remember that idealistic &_&ures always flourish in those periods when people have made the greatest materialistic advance. There is good evidence for believing that the various “ Golden Ages ” in fine arts were not so much the result of literary revolts as the revolts of the well-to-do against the dead, dry, traditional cultures born of poverty and incrusted in form and ceremonial. At any rate, it is significant that the Periclean Age in Grecian history came exactly at the time when Athens was trading with a thousand posts in the Mediteranean basin and that whenshe lost this commerce, her culture went out the window. The Golden Age of Roman Literature followed close on the heels of Rome’s greatest commercial expanse. The Italian Renaissance was bought and paid for by business men who discovered the art of converting raw materials into finished products and shipping them out to the peoples of the world. Profits are as essential in a cultural expanse as the geniuses. At any rate, the geniuses have always arrived just behind the profits. But more specifically, no century and a half in historical time has made the cultural advance Western Civilization has made since 1800. In the United States, for instance, we have provided higher standards of living, unequaled political rights and privileges, a degree of social equality, a diffusion of opportunity, a scope of educational advantages, an amount of religious freedom and economic independence unprecedented in the history of the world. No nation has now, or ever has had, so many of its children in schools and colleges. In the life of one generation we have seen a Iz-hour working day go and tagged inhuman, high school attendance increase 700 per cent., college attendance increase 300 per cent., and through libraries, the press, extension courses and radio educational opportunities literally hurled at the heads of all. If it does not stick, it is not the fault of the machine, which has so largely contributed to the program by creating the wealth with which to pay for it all. Only blockheads need longer
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remain ignorant in this country. Since 1900, our savings in banks, building and loan associations increased six times, we multiplied our life insurance over 1200 per cent., and while this hard-boiled stuff was going on, our charity and philanthropy for idealistic cultural purposes rose to our tenth ranking industry ! We need not claim that the machine was the creator of this It is enough for it to say that it idealistic cultural program. created the wealth and provided the leisure that the thing might happen. For wealth and leisure are essentials in any cultural advance. Economic techniques have changed very slowly. In spite of the common error that we lived by agriculture exc2usiveZy prior to about 1800, it was the chief economic technique up to that time. Since then our adoption of the industrial technique has been rapid. While retaining sufficient of this basic industry of agriculture, the emphasis has been shifted somewhat and the fascinating achievement of American development in more recent years may be credited to production made possible by an improved agriculture and industry, both largely the result of the perfected machine. In spite of such altruistic service, our intelligentsia are bringing harsh impeachments against the machine, and it is being thrust into outer darkness by honest, tender-hearted people who feel deeply. Speaking at Leeds University in England recently, the Bishop of Ripon made a devastating onslaught on the poor old machine when he declared, “ The enemy of progress now is not so much the beast within man as the machine which has him in its grip. The machine subjects the human spirit to a mental habit, a tyrannous technique, because men move in mechanical masses.” It will be a great day for religion, not to mention the devil, when Bishops turn from preaching the beast out of men and devote their energies to converting iron and steel ! The Rev. H. P. Frost recently exclaimed, ” In this age of the machine, the shadow of a Frankenstein Monster falls like a sinister menace across the upward pathway of the race.” He is more eloquent than the Bishop, but pitched in the same key. Professor Harry E. Barnes recently declared, “The machine has confused and will finally destroy its baffled
Mar., 1933.1
WHAT THE MACHINE Is DOING.
2.53
creator.” Mr. Austin Freeman, a widely quoted author, believes that as the machine becomes more efficient man becomes less independent and self-reliant. He becomes more regimented, his personal liberty more abated, and his sensibilities become blunted and debased. This is pretty nearly saying that it takes more mental ingenuity to drive an oxteam than an automobile. It certainly takes a different vocabulary. And Sir Philip Gibbs has said that we shall either have to kill all the scientists or reform our morals. Well, some of our morals need reforming. They always have. But as bad as they are, I am in favor of giving our scientists one more chance. Professor Edward A. Ross in his ” Outline of Sociology ” says “the factory locksteps the worker,” that the product of the machine is impersonal, and that “artists agree that machine production for the market is without the interest excited by hand production for an individual and that the products are neither sign$icant nor beautiful.” If anything in this world has been glorified out of all People who wax eloquent about the reason, it is handcrafts. character of the worker and the beauty and personalization of the product of the handcraft days should reread their history to learn what handcraft workers put up with, and reexamine with critical eye the artistry of some of the products. But, mind you, there is nothing new in all of this. Carlyle hated invention. Thackery despised the machine. Tennyson found new metaphors with which to damn the machine. Browning soundly disliked science and all of its doings while optimistically exclaiming, “God’s in His Heaven, All’s right with the world.” Yet at that very moment his fellow men were naked and hungry in the streets for want of what the machine could have given them, and dying from simple contagions caused by the lack of simple sanitation which science could have supplied. Such is the idealism of poets and philosophers, however. They will have their whims. Goethe saw red every time he saw a cotton mill, but he enjoyed his fine clothes woven by the hands of peasants who toiled sixteen hours a day and often went hungry into the bargain, that this intellectual peacock might look the part. Matthew Arnold contemptuously referred to the machine of his day as “producing an unspiritual civilization,” while Victorian England
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constantly preached the return to nature and the simple life of In an earlier day in the life of this Republic, a renunciation. wisdom-laden school board out in Ohio refused to allow a group of young people in the neighborhood the use of the school house for a debate as to whether railroads would be a good thing for Ohio on the grounds that if the Lord had meant for people to ride through the countryside of Ohio at the death-dealing rate of twelve miles per hour, he most certainly would have said something about it in the Bible. Many years later, a goodly old farmer in the same State refused to buy a mowing machine from a traveling salesman on the grounds that the Bible says, ” In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread,” and since no man could possibly sweat riding a comfortable seat while mowing his meadow in Ohio, he would have none of this machine stuff. It is not of record why the salesman did not tell him the Bible is also silent on the matter of smoking a pipe. He probably never had attended a short course in salesmanship ! Laborers in England as late as I 860 went into the mills of England and broke up the machines in the textile mills. Basically, this is the same argument which we use when we attempt to limit production by individuals to make the job last longer. And so it goes. The machine is anathema. Our intelligentsia, that interesting group among us who are so busy formulating a philosophy about life which will justify themselves in having nothing to do with it, that they have no time left to take any part in it, have gone into the automobile factories, have there counted the holes a man can drill in a wheel-rim in one minute with an automatic drill. Being good at figures, they multiply this by 60 and this by 8 and this by 6 and, having conclusively arrived at an astoundingly enormous number of holes the man can drill in a week, they instantly conclude that this is too many holes and that the machine is, therefore, a monster. Being as clever with words as they are with figures, they proceed to write vehemently of a “mechanized civilization,” a “machine-bound man,” “handcuffed to the machine” with such other appealing notes in supposed defense of the poor, enslaved, bedeviled, “ machine-cursed ” laborer, that they drive tender-hearted ladies to tears and reformers to the platforms.
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Our progress has produced growing pains. Masses of men have confounded the natural adjustments of a rapidly developing technique based on science and the machine with an earlier technique based on handcrafts and have found fault with the newer tempo of life because it entertains different ideals and ways of living. To these, the machine is a Frankenstein Monster and will ultimately destroy us. It should be enough to observe that the original ” Monster ” was only a fiction and that the modern machine is the most altruistic thing in modern life. But the critics pile Ossa on Pelion. The machine has given us our factories. Factories have given us our cities. Cities have given us ‘our business system, and our business system has given us our wealth. It is no matter to the intelligentsia that all civilizations are city-made. They cynically exclaim that business adds nothing to civilization; that business is a distressing force and that loftier aspirations are crushed by it. Industrialism and avarice are “ buddies” and “ clinking coins have no place in the music of aspirations.” We are told that the marketplace is no place to look for civilization. Business and the “machine civilization” which produced it are both bad, and “soul-killing” industrialism is terrible. “ Big Business,” which seems to be in hiding just now, is especially distasteful to the critics of the machine, though I have no doubt they will be glad to see it when it reappears. Of course the facts are that “Big Business” is relatively smaller today than ever before in the history of the world. One dollar out of every four we earn in this country goes to 50,ooo tax-gathering and tax-spending agencies, in addition to hundreds of millions more for philanthropy, our tenth ranking industry. So it is, that a larger proportion of our wealth goes for culture than was true of any nation in the ancient world. We are told that the total income of Rome for any one year in the Augustan Age was only 5 per cent. of New York City’s last year’s budget ! What we have in this country is Big Culture, and if our intelligentsia don’t watch out, they will discover who pays for their bread! There is nothing new in any of this. The Bishop of Ripon and Goethe say exactly what Ghandi says. But having taken
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a bicycle home with him from England, this modern saint will find he has started something he cannot stop, and by this act of improving his personal transportation he automatically disqualifies himself to speak with authority. We may charitably suspend judgment upon all these critics of the machine until we learn more about their mode of living. However, as a matter of courteous suggestion, born entirely of a desire to serve, we may be pardoned for suggesting that these gentlemen all take a trip to Thibet, Afghanistan, or Patagonia, where there is no machinery at all, and where there is no “ tyrannous technique ” to harass them. However, some of this criticism needs examining. There are some features about the machine none too pleasant to contemplate. But it does have defenses, and they are soundly rational and historically accurate. In the first place, it is a common fallacy that we have the only ” industrial civilization ” which has ever existed. On the contrary, all civilizations have been industrial. There is no other way for them to exist. They have differed only in degree and intensity and the variations in them have been determined almost entirely by the wants of men at a given time. The quality of life and the culture produced has invariably depended upon the success of the commercial and industrial period and its duration. The greater the wealth produced in the period, the greater the contemporary culture. And culture is always contemporaneous with the commercial and industrial growth of any civilization. Phoenicians sent caravans trading to the Orient. Incidentally, they brought back an alphabet and sent culture on its way a thousand years. Culture always follows business. Business has been the forerunner of every great civilization which the world has known. But, more specifically, the intelligentsia tell us: I. That there is no beauty in the machine. The Leviathan has no Poets like ready-made metaphors. creaky wooden hull, no greasy decks, no knotted cordage, no patched canvas bellying to the breeze. So the modern poet turns up his nose at her because her comfort is too comfortable;
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her efficiency too efficient; her safety too safe. A Viking Long Boat would inspire this modern poet, but not the Europa. The facts are, however, that the automobile is as beautiful as any chariot ever driven by ancient charioteer, and the modern liner surpasses in beauty any fantastic tub that ever tested cordage or the courage of a mariner, while the airplane is as beautiful as the flying bird itself, and a modern passenger engine is a work of art. 2.
The machine
destroys artistry in the product.
On the contrary, the machine is democratizing art. The man in the street today wears a more artistic shoe than Henry VIII ; and the King picked his shoes with the same discriminating care he did his women. A modern electric range is a more artistic piece of furniture than the dressing table of Mary, Queen of Scats, if only you forget we use the range to fry bacon and she used the dressing table to make up on. Through the reproduction of artistic tapestries in wallpaper, the machine has made it well-nigh impossible to go into a first-class paper store and buy an ugly roll of wallpaper. The machine is not destroying art. It is democratizing it by making accessible to all men artistic forms of the necessities and luxuries of modem life. Fundamentally, this is the objection the intelligentsia have to the machine. It is making art, learning and leisure accessible to all men, and hitherto these have been the exclusive prized possessions of the intellectual classes. The products of the machine are artistic. 3. There is nothing human in the machine. It is crushing the life out of men, reducing them to mere robots, keeping them “handcuffed to the machine,” making mere automatons of them. This is just too bad! The facts are the machine is the most humane thing yet contrived by man, and has far outstripped his philosophy or his altruism in freeing man from arduous toil and slavery. Aristotle accepted human slavery as did our own forebears. The altruism of the Christian religion, with the challenge of its master that all men are brothers constantly ringing in its ears for centuries, complacently accepted human slavery and
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waited until the machine made the system economically impossible before “rising up to strike off the shackles” of human slavery. To face a fact, it must be said that human slavery has persisted longest in those civilizations where the agrarian life So true is this, was the predominant economic technique. that even ex-slaves from America returning to Africa using only handcrafts and machineless agriculture have adopted a system which the machine liberated them from, and there is good evidence for the fact that many of the evils of tenant farming are nothing more than a throw-back from a slave agriculture, for the curve of tenant farming invariably diminishes as the curve representing the use of machines on the farm increases. Time was not so long ago when 16 hours was a legal day’s work. The machine has made this inhumane. Altruism never freed slaves. Where hand-labor, with its “ennobling influences” persists, the majorities are dangerously close to slavery yet. Any intelligent traveler will find this out if he will take a swing around the circuit outside Western Civilization where the machine has revolutionized norms of thinking, standards of living, and customs of conduct. What the intelligentsia seem to want are “the good old days ” when the cobbler worked at his bench 16 hours, ate three meals at his work, and lived in a stuffy, airless room and enjoyed his “creative freedom.” Great stuff, that ! London, 200 years ago, was largely one of these “ideal handcraft” cities of the “good old days” variety. Then the industrial artists had “pride in their work” and disease in their systems-for the death rate under those “ideal working conditions” was 50 to each 1,000 of the population as against 123 today under the machine. The machine has brought life, not death, as the critics of the machine would have us believe. To our intelligentsia, wielding a sledge-hammer IO to 12 hours a day in a sooty blacksmith shop is ennobling. But to sit on a comfortable seat in a well-heated and ventilated factory manipulating with a delicate lever a trip-hammer is very debasing. The tenant farmer in America is nearer this “ideal handcraft” stage than any man among us. From 50 to 7.5 per
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cent. of these must turn over half of all they have made to the landlord. Lord, deliver us from such “ ideal hand-crafts ” ! Oscar Wilde says, “The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. . . . Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.” Here is a poet with a sociological background. Here is real intelligentsiaism! 4. That we are a nation of mere machine tenders. In IgIo we had 41,615,ooo people employed in the United States; 7,972,OOO of these were workers in factories, while 827,000 more worked at other enterprises connected with factories, giving a total of about g,ooo,ooo men and women engaged in working with and about machines. Of these nearly nine millions, the highest estimate we have seen of actual machine tenders is 4,500,000. Our population in 1910 was 10571 I ,000. The “machine tenders,” therefore, amounted to only about 4+ per cent. of the population, or 13 per cent. of the total number of employed persons in the United States. We do not concede it, but granting that this 13 per cent. of employed were more or less slaves to the machine, it is interesting to compare the conditions that existed in the Periclean Age of Greece, where there were 5,000,ooo free men and 12,000,000 slaves. It took 70 per cent. of the population as human slaves to produce the Golden Age of Athenian culture, whereas only about 4$. per cent. of our population work at the machine, and I maintain it is neither so strenuous nor as enslaving as ordinary labor in the open fields or in the blacksmith shop. As a matter of fact, machine tenders are decreasing. In 1928, there were 1,250,ooo fewer men in factories than in 1923, and ‘28 was one of our busiest recent years. This does not mean that fewer men were at work, although popular opinion has put this construction upon it. It only means that fewer men were at work in factories and fewer men were tending machines, for during the same period we added directly more than 2,000,ooo men and women to our payrolls, who were working at new trades and new enterprises which the higher development of the machine had made possible. Directly and indirectly, the figures are nearer 4,000,000.
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5. The factory system is undermining the health of industrial civilizations. It is interesting to observe that, with modem machines, ventilated factories and a regard for the health of the “machine bound” man, the healthiest occupation in all England is the manufacture of glue and fertilizer. The most modem machine on the horizon is found in the electrical field. The death rate among electrical workers is exactly 50 per cent. below that of the country at large. Following the glue and fertilizer workers, there come in order of health, electrical workers, preachers, gardeners, farmers, teachers, doctors, lawyers. It is suggested for health’s sake, that the lawyers invent some machine for administering justice. It would be healthier and might be equally just! As a matter of fact, the workers in soap factories outrank in health all of the workers in the professions just enumerated. There has been a good deal of “ballyhoo” about the evil effects of the machine upon men’s physical health and upon his mental and spiritual attitudes toward life. The linotype machine was invented in 1887. At that time typesetters were working twelve to fourteen hours a day. By 1903, there were 7,500 of these machines in use. The hours for setting type had been reduced from 14 to 8. The wages increased 20 per cent. The death rate decreased 30 per cent. A very unhealthy thing, this linotype machine! As a matter of fact, the mental and spiritual outlook upon life is very closely related to physical health. Noting much of the choleric stuff now coming from the critics of the machine, and seeing that the health tables are all against them as compared with machine workers, we suggest that they take up tending the ” deadly machine ” for a while until they regain sufficient health to get their livers going. Accidents are closely related to health. Today, in the “machine-made” world, there are fewer accidents to the man who works than ever before in the history of civilization. The records prove this in spite of the fact that in an earlier day only major accidents were reported while today all accidents are reported. One thread factory in this country went IO,OOO,OOO man-hours without a lost-time accident. Many plants go for months and years with not so much as one losttime accident.
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Mr. Frederick Ecker’s Metropolitan Life Insurance Company has just announced among its industrial policy holders the lowest death rate in all history. Abe Martin says somewhere in his collection of classical nonsense that it is funny how a man with facts can break up an argument. This Metropolitan fact is just too bad for critics of the “ deadly machine.” 6. The machine
throws men out of work.
Philosophically, the best answer to this criticism is, that this is exactly the glory of the machine-it does the work of men and thus releases them for more interesting pursuits. Many idealists wish it were possible to do all the work of the world with the machine. It has already demonstrated its usefulness by abolishing actual human slavery and releasing other millions from 14 to 16 hour days to 8 and 9 hour days. But that the machine “throws men out of work” is another one of those ” perfectly self-evident propositions” which does not happen to be true. Turning to England for a moment, because the figures have been carefully recorded there by the Government for more than a hundred years, and taking its largest industry,’ textiles, we find that it took 320 persons to spin as much in 1769 as one man could spin in 1840. But in 1855, just 15 years later, one man could spin as much as 700 men could spin in 1769. Arkwright invented the first, spinning machine in 1855. That is the year we have one man spinning as much as 700 men could spin just 86 years before. According to the argument of the man in the street, this is throwing 699 men out of work in the lifetime of one octogenarian. But this is a piece with much of the logic of the man in the street. He feels his thoughts. But have a look at the facts in the case: TABLE Men Employed in Textile Industry.
Year. 1835..
218,000
1847.. 1850.. *1856 1862.. 1870..
I 874. 1878.. 1885. 1890. 1895.. 1907. 1914..
I.
In England.
316,000 331,000 *379,000 (Year
. .
. ..
450,000
. . 479,600 . 483,000 . . . 504,000 .
.
451,000
526,800 538,900 677,000 689,000
after Arkwright
invented first spinning machine)
JAMES SHELBY THOMAS.
262
[J. F. I.
There was a steady growth of employment in an industry in which the improvement of the machine was going forward at a faster rate, perhaps, than the machines of any other industry. In 1831 the population But this does not tell all of the story. By 191 I, the population had of England was 24,028,584. This means that while the population grown to 45221,615. This does not ~wasdoubling, the cotton workers were trebling. look as though the improved machine was causing unemployment. But someone will advance the idea that the cotton trade in England presents the exceptional case. I wonder if it does. The makers of machines, tools, engines, mill-wrights, fitters, watchmakers, turners, and such like people have had the same experience. In England, the 14 “Engineering Trades” show the same thing. Let’s have a look at what has happened to these workers: TABLE Number Year. 1871 1881. 1891. 1901. 1911.
M&s.
222,594 253,994 323,327 507,782 564,994
II.
of Persons
Females.
12,900 13,982 18,904 22,738 37,413
Employed.
Total.
235.584 267,976 342,231 530,520 602,407
Decennial Increases.
13-7% 27.7 55.0 13.5
Here again, we have the same result. The number of persons employed increased all the time while the machines were being improved all the time. A mere glance at the decennial increases shows that the number of people employed in 14 engineering trades in England increased much faster than the population increased. Taking the four periods in which the percentage of increase could be figured, the last four, we find that the average increase for the four is 27.475 per cent., which, of course, is far beyond the populational increase for the same period. But there are also figures for the trade that has made the most rapid advance in perfecting the machines, the printing trade. The advance in technique in this trade has been little
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short of marvelous. Yet when the figures for printing and distribution of the product are taken into consideration, the same conclusion is reached. It is estimated that the manhours necessary now to bind ‘a thousand books are only onethird of what they were just thirty years ago. There are figures on this trade which show that improving the machine puts men and women to work, not out of work. Examine the following table-figures taken from the English census again : TABLE
III.
Number of Persons Employed.
Year. -~___~ ;;g; 1891.. 1901.. 1911..
::
Males.
Females.
Total.
66,071 57,484 8,587 74,542 12,941 871483 102,082 19,125 121,207
119,834 140,968
29,959 43,107
149,793 184,075
Decennial Increase.
32.4% 38.5 23.5
23.0
Publishers, Book-Sellers and News Dealers.
14,163 16,865 23,394 31,972
4047
These figures show a constant increase of employment even at a more rapid rate than the populational increases. Truth is, that most of our apprehensions about the machine putting large numbers of people out of work is based on the false assumption that demand for goods will become stationary. Quite the reverse is true. There is no good reason for assuming that desire for the good things of life will suddenly cease. Thirty years from now, huge fortunes will be made out of new patents not now in the Patent Offices of the world. Now printing, with the engineering trades, is perhaps most The most cursory subject to the influence of invention. examination of the advance in technique in these trades will reveal a real epic of progress. Combining printing and engineering trades in England, and calculating the percentages of increase in employment in them over a period of forty years, we get not unemployment, but a steady increase of employment. Only once did population increase faster than the number of persons engaged in engineering. This was the period from But these trades more than made up for this 1871 to 1881.
264
TABLE
Year. 1871...... 1881...... x891...... I~oI...... 1911......
[J. F. I.
JAMES SHELBY THOMAS.
Populational InCreaSe. 13.21% 14.36 11.65 12.17 10.89
IV.
Increase in Engineering Trades.
Increase in Printing.
-
-
13.7% 27.7
32.4% 38.5
13.5
23.0
55.0
23.5
decc-nnial in the three following periods. From 1891 to 1901, the engineering trades increased the workers by 55.0 per cent. The printing trades have had a steady increase, which only means that more people were reading and were being told in much of what they read that the machine was going to upset civilization! At the very time, it was employing more and more men to print and distribute the very stuff designed to show what an awful menace a modern press is! It is not very convincing. It is revealed by British statistics that the total number employed in industry (and all trades affected by the invention of new and modem machines are included) increased during the thirty years between 1881 and 191 I from 6,373,ooo persons to g,468,ooo. This is the astounding rate of 48 per cent. for the period. But the population of England for the same period increased only 38 per cent. But for the strident voices of the calamity howlers, the ghost of unemployment as caused by the machine could be forgotten. Of course the fact is that but for the machine, England’s population could not have increased 38 per cent. in the thirty-year period between 1881 and 191 I. And for a very good reason. The country could not possibly have supported them. Starvation, or peasant standards of living for all, is the alternative right now between that state and the best machines possible. The causes of our present unemployment plight cannot be charged to the machine. There are plenty of other reasons for this depression. Some people have become so excited about the machine they are not thinking. Wanting a scapegoat, they approach the thicket and lo, the machine! Coming to a consideration of some home figures, what do we find? Throughout the history of the industrial era, this
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problem of the repercussions of greater efficiency in manufacturing processes incident to the use of machines has been ,Fver recurring. To epitomize the development of productivity from 1919 to 1925, both for industry and for the individual worker, the Department of Commerce has given us the following summary, in Table V: TABLE V. Industries 1925.
Index of Increased Productivity in Manufacturing (IgIg egU& Vehicles for Land Transportation.
IO0
Physical Volume of Production.
Production Per Person.
I I --
Vehicles-Land Trot.. . :. ............ Rubber. ........ Metal and Metal, Products other than Iron and Steel ........... Stone, Clay, Glass.
............. Tobacco Mfg ................... Chemical, Allied Products. ...... Food and Allied Products. ...... Paper and Printing. ............ Iron and Steel. ................ Lumber ....................... Textile and Products. .......... Leather and Its Mfgs ........... Ship and Boat Bldg ............. All Industries.
.................
283.3 158.3
108.3 79.7
182.5 152.8
220.0 199.3
132.4 179.1 124.4 140.6 116.4 152.8 131.5 113.6 119.3 93.4 7.0
81.2 115.1
114.0 151.5 97.0 147.1 115.8 131.1 114.1 86.9 126.6 106.9 54.8
163.1 155.6 155.7 153.2 143.2 140.4 137.6 120.7 I 14.2 103.1 51.8
128.6
91.4
121.8
140.7
$:;: 81.3 108.8 95.6 94.1 104.5 90.6 13.3
-_
1.
Again, on the basis of 1914 as 100, the following table shows the advances in the output per worker in certain leading industries for the period 1914 to 1925: TABLE VI. Industry. Iron and Steel Industry: As a Whole ...................... Blast Furnaces. .................. Steel Works and Rolling Mills. .... Boots and Shoes. .................... Leather Tanning. .................... Slaughtering and Meat Packing. ....... Petroleum Refining. .................. Paper and Wood Pulp. ............... .............. Cement Manufacturing. ........................ Automobiles. Rubber Tires. ....................... Flour Milling. ....................... Cane Sugar Refining .................. VOL. 215, NO. 1287-19
Per Cent. Increase
in IndividualOutput.
... .. . .
.. ..
.
‘.’
59 54 (to 1923)
.
5z
“’
.
.
.
. .
I
.
.
. . .
. . ...
“’
26 27 83
364 172 . ..ZII . . 36 . . 28
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Meanwhile, for the same period, productivity for steam railroads increased 40 per cent. per man-hour, train and engine crews alone about 34 per cent. In bituminous coal mining, the individual efficiency increased 25 per cent. between 1915 and 1925. There has been increased efficiency caused by better management and more modern machines. Far from being a cause for criticism, it is a consumation devoutly to be wished. The National Industrial Conference Board, in making a study of mass production in the United States recently, brought to light some interesting facts in Comparing the Iinited States with Great Britain. The Board takes eight leading industries and compares the horsepower per wage earner, and the value added per wage earner and finds that the advantages in production and value added are all with this It also finds that there has been little increase in country. mechanization of industry in Great Britain for the 17 years ending 1924. But in these eight leading industries, it finds on the basis of 1913 prices the output per worker in 1917 was $1,540 in England as against $1,740 in 1924, an increase of $200 or 13 per cent. per worker. During practically the same period, we had an increase per worker of 35 per cent. The Board states, “Eight selected major manufacturing industries in the United States which use an average of I+ as much horsepower per wage earner employed as do the same industries in Great Britain, turn out, largely as a result of this greater use of power, from 23 to 3 times as much production per wage earner employed. This greater productivity per worker accounts largely for the higher wage levels and living standards prevailing in the United States. . . . ” Now it will be evident that, in spite of the greater mechanization of industry in this country than prevailed during the same period in Great Britain, unemployment began in Britain before it did here, attained its worst proportion sooner than it did here, and has retained its greater magnitude in proportion to the number of employed persons. If the machine has been the cause of our present unemployment, as a Cabinet Member and at least two of our United States Senators recently declared, we should have far outstripped Great Britain, as our mechanization since the World War has been much more rapid. But this is not the case.
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This advancing efficiency, and the drop in American industry from wartime inflation, had between 1920 and 1928 put 917,000 men out of work. 1 am using Government figures, Department of Commerce. If to these we add ~OO,OOO in the decline of employes in agriculture, only a part of whom may be charged to machines, and the 240,000 relieved from railroads, we arrive at a formidable figure of nearly 2,000,000. Too many social reformers are overwhelmed with these figures and go no further. But it is only half of the story. For instance, between 1920 and 1928, there was an increase in the number of workers in servicing and driving automobiles of 760,000, including IOO,OOO bus drivers, a vocation which did not exist in 1914. Th ere were Ioo,ooo more insurance agents in 1928 than in 1919. These additional men were made necessary by the large expanse which took place in insurable fields incident to new industry and trades. Electric refrigeration, light and power, and oil heating establishments have increased employment by another IOO,OOO. Between 1919 and 1928, another IOO,OOOwere added through construction There were 232,000 more teachers work and management. and professors required to look after the young in 1928 than in 1919. Motion picture servitors (not production employes) added another I 25,000. Barbers and hairdressers to the tune of 170,000, and personal service in hotels and restaurants, 750,000, and radio, 200,000. Thus it appears from the facts that, while we were displacing in America 1,957,ooo people through increased efficiency made possible by the machine, we were adding in new trades and professions 2,527,OOO people! The difference just accounts for the increase in population during the period. Hence it is that as the machine becomes more and more efficient, the new service functions not only offset unemployment, but indicate a larger per capita earning power and thus increase the standards of living. The machine plus brains equals goods, comforts and wealth. This formula increased factory production almost 60 per cent. between 1900 and I 925, and the same thing happened on the railroads, in the mines, and on the farms. The perfection of the tool has measured the speed of man’s upward journey from
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[J.1;.1.
the Stone Age to now. Considering all industries in the United States, 71 workers in 1925 could produce as much as 109 could produce just 25 years before, and while working from 5 to I0 per cent. less time. Just here is the crowning glory of the machine. Let us be quick to admit that the productive output per worker has increased, that fewer men in a given field can do more work. But having admitted this much, there is no use being stampeded by the intelligentsia. To reduce the hours a man works in this world has always been considered a desirable thing to do. If the machine enables him to do more work in less time, it proves itself humane, not a menace. If this criticism of the machine were confined to journalistic opinion it would be bad enough. But when a Cabinet Officer and a United States Senator inject it into debate and ascribe our present unemployment to its baneful influence, it becomes just too bad. They are even quoting figures from railways and industry to prove their point. However, they say nothing about unemployment in fields where little or no machines are used and conveniently overlook the new fields for labor brought in by the machine.. The hammer chorus is growing louder and is anything but harmonious. We must also admit that a similar relative contraction of the number of employed took place in railroading, mining, and other enterprises. Though it must be said in defense of the machine that much of the mine labor was not needed because of a decline in the demand for coal. The total decline in men employed in manufacturing between 1920 and 1928 was 917,000, which added to those displaced in railroading, mining and farming gives us approximately 2 ,ooo,ooo men displaced through over-expansion incident to the war and the increased efficiency of the machine and factory management. Admitted. These are only fractional data. But they are much more convincing than the Frankenstein Monster talk. They prove somewhat conclusively that as the machine grows more efficient, hours of labor grow less, goods get cheaper and better, and the only limitless thing in the world, human wants, expands to demand sufficient additional goods to keep everybody at work, provided we behave as we should.
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“ Technocracy ” has recently given us some interesting statistical evidence for what we have all along known in a general way. The technique for obtaining a living and the amount of living obtained per person changed very little from the dawn of history until about 1800, say; but now we find the average citizen of the United States consuming 75 times what he did in 1800, and about 66 per cent. of this increase has been in one generation, or since 1900. Some assume our present distress is due to this large use of energy, and predict worse to come. This is equivalent to saying a man should work 12 or 14 hours per day with his hands to get food, clothing and shelter, and poor food, poor clothing and poor shelter at that, as he did in the days of Menes, Alcibides, or Napoleon. ‘’Technocracy ” affirms that besides the 2,000 calories a day necessary for existence, man is now using 150,000 calories in addition to the 2,000 he consumes as food. This is good. It means that after some 7,000, or more, years of life on 2,000 calories, and frequently bad calories at that, as, for instance, putrid meat before the days of refrigeration, the evidence of which may be observed about the middle of the figures on any English etching of reasonably early date, man made up his mind to live some and went out and dug up 150,000 more calories which, while he could not eat them, were very useful in supporting homes, colleges, radios, travel and as thouand and one other things more or less useful and always interesting. The same authority quotes more figures to show how very rapidly we have developed energy for our uses, and adds that if we used the most efficient method of production only 30 per cent. of the people now employed would be needed to do the job. Since about 38,000,000 now work in normal times the most efficient methods would mean 20,000,000 people would not be needed unless new inventions should bring in new enterprises. This would make a jobless army, indeed! If But there is no need to surrender the point so quickly. 30 per cent. of our present workers can do all we need done, it For it is a simple device to keep should be quickly welcomed. all workers and shorten the hours, thus providing leisure for any sort of creative work the soul desires. The same authorities apply their findings to the automobile industry, saying that had it not been for the improved methods
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[J. F. I.
in that industry, the industry alone would have offered work for from 2,500,000 to 4,ooo,ooo, just about the number added by population growth since 1904. What is overlooked here is that you cannot use more than IO per cent. of your total working force to supply you with only one means of transportation and get away with it. The cost of cars under such a program would make them prohibitive to the average man. Professor Charles A. Beard has recently said, “A knowledge of the good life is our certain philosophic heritage, and technology has given us a greater power over nature which enables us to provide the conditions of the good life for all the earth’s multitudes. That seems to me to be the most engaging possibility of the drama, and faith in the potentialities keeps me working at it even in the worst hours of disallusionment.” Since Edward Carpenter wrote his “ Civilization, Its Cause and Cure,” and tried to exemplify to Victorians what he was talking about by living outside the conventional creed of his day, we have had plenty of critics of our civilization by people from the outside. Morris, Ruskin, and a thousand others have indulged themselves thus. But only recently, Sir Alfred Ewing, immediate President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, has spoken from the inside and he declares with reference to science, “The command of Nature has been put into Man’s hands before he knows how to command himself.” Discovery and invention have moved with lightning-like rapidity during the last one hundred years. But this is nothing to be excited about. Our material advance always leads the way for institutional change. I have no apprehensions about our ability to control science and to Indeed, the very rapidity with properly use the machine. which science and the machine have moved is good for us. It makes possible what will be the greatest cultural advance the world has ever known. But the machine has some positive arguments it may modestly advance to justify its place in the sun. In the first place, it is a great educational force. It has reduced the physical fact of this world to a readily reached neighborhood and the mental, racial, economic and political facts of the world to a community problem. It has widened the outlook and emphasized the relations of men. Isolation is now as
Mar., 1933.1
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simple as it is impossible. The railroads, autos, and airplanes are taking us everywhere. The telephone, telegraph, and the radio are telling us everything. Today, the workers’ relation to the world is what it used to be to his little community, and for the first time in human history the working man has been given some leisure to read, study and develop a hobby. The machine has been a fairy godmother to the toiler. Today the problem of education is not so much to teach the man how to work, as to teach the wise use of the leisure the machine has given him. Psychologically, there is something in the machine which calls out the best there is in us. If you drive a car yourself, you are alert, observant, active. There are definite characterbuilding processes going on in such an enterprise. The comfort of the machine is something. The reaction of the human being to it is much more. The machine forces and demands a certain amount of intelligent interest. Machine workers rarely go insane. Few of them find it necessary to leave their jobs because of mental disorders. In wellorganized industry, ,there are recreational opportunities such as play-grounds, tennis courts, moving pictures, cafeterias where ideas are exchanged and social intercourse indulged in, and many other opportunities for wholesome living. In this connection, it will be helpful to observe that approximately 90 per cent. of the women confined in asylums of the Southeast are for melancholia, and come from the quietude of the farm-so beautifully written about by the poets, and on which so few poets care to live. There is no danger that the machine will master the man. The man created the machine. He will be silly indeed to let it master him. The triumph of the material over the spiritual would be a tragedy. We have traveled faster and gone farther toward providing the material comforts of life in a hundred years than the Old World did in forty centuries. There is some evidence among us of sensation hunting. This is too bad. But it is a mere rash. We like sensations. Our heroes must be giants. Our recreation must be hair-raising, our social life showy and spectacular, and our religion “hellbusting.” This is the result of the speed by which we have come where we are. But it is not so bad. Our very speed has
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[J.I;.1.
brought us to the gates of a sparkling culture. The materialistic splendor of the background assures an original cultural pattern. It will be the best unwritten culture the world ever saw. The “deadly machine” is responsible for the background. America is young. It is scarce 300 years since the Pilgrims landed here. We are still adolescing. But what a soil, what a country, what a wealth to carry a new culture!